In his Nov. 16 letter to the editor, “Rebuttal to Tom Harris’s letter and the NIPCC,” Nick Poggioli has chosen to question the authority of the independent Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC). Second, he asserts that the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is a more credible authority than the NIPCC.

This is not a good time to be claiming authority for the IPCC, which now has a 15-year-long history of scientific malfeasance that stretches back to its Second Assessment Report in 1995. On that occasion, recommendations from one of the expert science advisory groups were reworded in alarmist terms by a single scientist charged with preparing the wording for the critical Summary for Policymakers.

Along the way since, we have had:

(i) the resignation of leading scientists from IPCC because of their dissatisfaction with its procedures;

(ii) the domination of the 2001 Third Assessment Report by the statistically invalid “hockey stick” graph of global temperature; and

(iii) the discovery of the dysfunctional peer-reviewing of the 2007 Fourth Assessment Report, in which a full 30 percent of the references have proved to represent student theses and reports by environmental activist groups and the like.

Meanwhile, November 2009 saw the publication of e-mails leaked from the IPCC’s main advisory group for the global temperature record, located at the Climatic Research Centre (CRU) at the University of East Anglia. As the subsequent “Climategate” affair showed, CRU scientists and their worldwide network of contacts have been abusing basic scientific process for many years, including attempting to manipulate the scientific literature toward their preferred alarmist stance on global warming in support of IPCC intentions.

Finally, and just a few weeks ago, Canadian investigative journalist Donna Laframboise published her devastating exposé of the chicanery and corruption that underlie many IPCC processes in a new book titled The delinquent teenager who was mistaken for the world’s top climate expert.

It has been clear for many years, then — and as is to be expected of a body that is composed of government appointees — that the IPCC is dominantly a political body. As such, the organization gives political advice that, in turn, rests upon politicized and spun views of the basic science (i.e., “Frisbee” science). The IPCC’s reputation as a source of credible and impartial scientific advice is, therefore, now shredded beyond retrieval, and many senior scientists believe that it should be closed down forthwith.

In contrast, the authors and contributors to the NIPCC publications represent independent and often senior scientists who are beholden to no one, and have no political agenda to pursue. NIPCC presents the science as it is, not as it can be spun. In particular, NIPCC volumes contain descriptions of hundreds of papers that argue against the occurrence of dangerous human-caused global warming and which have gone unreported or under-reported by the IPCC.

Readers looking for a balanced and balancing perspective on the vexed issue of dangerous global warming will therefore be well served by consulting the 2011 NIPCC-2 Interim Report, as was initially recommended to them by Mr. Tom Harris.

Dr. Robert M. Carter is adjunct research fellow at James Cook University, Australia, chief science adviser to the International Climate Science Coalition, and a lead author of the 2011 Interim Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC: http://www.nipccreport.com).